Mickey Hart Essentials

As a member of the Grateful Dead, drummer Mickey Hart took a strong interest in percussion's place in music from around the world. His non-Dead work features a wide range of Native American, Indian, African and Brazilian musicians. He, in turn, brought all those influences into the Dead. Hart's musical studies inform the complex instrumentation on his albums, though some of them remain quite personal. 1989's Music to be Born By, a section of which appears on our playlist, finds him jamming with a recording of his as-yet-unborn son's heartbeat.